


This Is Probably Daniel's Fault (How to Survive an Alternate Reality, by Lance McClain)

by codefiant



Category: Voltron Force, Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Realities, Dimension Travel, False Identity, Gen, cameo from Actual Arusian Larmina
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 21:32:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13749651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/codefiant/pseuds/codefiant
Summary: Lance hates alteans, a lot. He also hates weird magic trans-reality comets and the drule, galra... whatever. And after he finds out that Voltron exists in this reality he has to go lock himself in his quarters for a bit so that he doesn't ruin his reputation as an ornery, grumpy human who is too old for this shit.





	This Is Probably Daniel's Fault (How to Survive an Alternate Reality, by Lance McClain)

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time I realized that VF!Lance and Matt Holt have the same haircut. Shoutout to the Discord members who came up with this being why.

Lance hates alteans, a lot. He also hates weird magic trans-reality comets and the drule, galra... whatever. He can't hate Daniel, even though it was probably his fault _somehow_ , but he can be _extremely annoyed and disappointed_.

And right now he's also allowed to be ornery and grumpy, because he's too old for this shit but here he is, blaster in hand, shooting robots. He _really_ hates the drule/galra/whatever because yeah it wasn't the life he imagined for himself when he was younger but it was _his_ life damn it. He just wants to grab a ship and go home, but the idea of going back to Colleen and telling her, “Yeah I left Matt in space with the evil aliens,” is not something that appeals to him, and apparently there's still some Voltron Force left in him. He really misses having his voltcom and his lion, but they're rebels; they make do.

When word of Voltron reaches the rebel cell he's with, he has to go lock himself in his quarters for a bit so that he doesn't ruin his reputation.

* * *

The galra had underestimated him. Badly. They looked at him and saw 'old squishy scientist from a backwards planet' and sent him to a mining colony on a planet far from the center of the Empire.

But Lance had escaped from the galra/drule/whatever before, and under much more difficult circumstances, which was how, instead of simply escaping, it was nearly child's play to lead a rebellion and free the entire colony. They destroyed all the equipment, collapsed the tunnels, and fucked off in all the ships to find somewhere peaceful for some of them, and find bigger guns for the rest. To make a long story short, they did.

* * *

“I've got the shield back up!” Allura shouted into her voltcom.

“It's too late, their flagship escaped,” Keith informed her. “We've got to take it down!”

“They're not sticking around, look!” Hunk said. “Their warp engine is powering up!”

“They're not just warping to another part of the galaxy,” Pidge said from the Den. “The sensors up here are indicating that they're giving it enough power to go to a different reality.”

“We can't let that happen. Prepare to form Voltron!”

“We don't have enough time!” Larmina said.

“We don't have enough time to take it out individually either!” Vince pointed out.

Lance took a deep breath. “Yes we do.”

The last thing he heard before he hit the spinning orb made out of magic comet that powered the flagship's warp drive was Keith shouting, “God _damn_ -”

* * *

When Lance wakes up, he's handcuffed to a hospital bed. The first words out of his mouth are, well, is, a flat, “What.”

A military type pokes his head in, then leaves again. Some time after that, a familiar face joins him. “Commander Iverson? What's going on?”

Commander Iverson raises his eyebrow. “You seem to have mistaken me for someone else. I'm a lieutenant.”

“You don't remember me? It's Lance McClain, you were my flight instructor...” Lance trails off. Commander Iverson is too young. “Did I travel back in time?”

“I want to know how you teleported into a top-secret military installation.”

“Seriously, what year is it?”

Commander Iverson's eyebrow twitches. “2032.”

It was time for Lance's second flat, “What.”

* * *

After he hears that Voltron exists in this universe, he searches the databanks for a planet called Arus. He still can't believe he got the go-ahead to take a shuttle there by making up that he had heard a rumor that Voltron was there.

What he finds is... not the arusians he was expecting. Clearly this was a waste of time, and all he's gotten is an annoying hanger-on in the form of the chief's niece following him around telling him how she's training to be the fiercest warrior on all of Arus. It's cute. And maybe by arusian standards even possible. Her name's Larmina, which is clearly a coincidence.

It also means that she's there to answer his questions when he stumbles upon the ruins while exploring. They're his-sized, AKA not arusian-sized. “You guys didn't build these, did you?” he asks.

Larmina shakes her head. “No. These were the ancient ruins where the Castle of Lions stood. We don't know who built them. Maybe it was the people who left the Castle of Lions here.”

Her wording is... odd. And the stone around the giant pit in the center is freshly broken, not eroded like the rest of the stone. “What happened to the Castle of Lions?”

Larmina starts gesturing wildly. “It woke up! Great people appeared and flew their ships in the sky to defend us from the galra! They welcomed us into the Castle of Lions, and then flew off to defend the universe!”

Lance frowns. “When was this?”

“A couple months ago. I hope they come back. The one called Lance said that he would knit me a sweater. I don't know what that means, but Princess Allura's dress was so beautiful so I hope it's something like that.”

Lance tilts his head. “Huh.”

* * *

One of Lance's least favorite things (as opposed to most hated, an entirely different ballpark) is when two operatives from different organizations meet mid-operation and shit proceeds to hit the fan. Which it invariably does, and did, because it turns out that whoever sent the other guy to do sneaky undercover work was an idiot.

“Well done, genius!” Lance shouts at them over the sound of blaster fire.

“Hey, I didn't see you doing anything!”

“Yeah, and my 'not doing anything' was not letting them know either of us were here!”

“Who sent you anyway?”

“Obviously not the person who sent you!” Lance pokes his head around the cover they've both taken and fires off shots, punctuating each one with a 'fuck'.

“If I draw their fire, will you be able to take them out?”

Lance would have dragged his hand down his masked face if he didn't need to see where he was shooting. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Well can you?”

“Better question: do you have a _death wish_?”

“I-”

“Nope, don't answer that, don't want to know.”

The other guy growled, then charged out waving his dumb fancy sword. A fucking _sword_. Talk about bringing a knife to a gun fight, only in space against space guns which was even _stupider_. Lance sighed, resigned himself to dragging a body back to his escape route which hopefully still existed, and started picking off the distracted galra sentries.

To his slight awe, it turns out that the other guy is laserproof or something, because they don't get a scratch in ninety-odd seconds it takes the two of them to take out all the sentries that are currently harassing them. More are on the way undoubtedly, but it gives them a moment to breathe and for them to say, “If we're here for the same thing, I've already got the intel. But they found my escape route and destroyed it.”

“I wonder why,” Lance deadpans.

“I'll share the intel if you get us both out of here.”

Lance considers leaving them to fend for themself because it _had_ to be safer for Lance if he wasn't anywhere near them. But with the base alerted to intruders now, getting the intel on his own would be a pain. “Fine,” he says. “But we do this my way, which means _sneaky and without shooting anything that moves_.”

* * *

Miracle of miracles, they manage to get to Lance's ship and safely away from the galra base without either of them dying. Lance wants to rip the guy a new one, but makes himself wait until he gets the intel. “So now that no one's shooting at us, why don't you take off your mask and tell me who you are?”

“You first.”

Lance gives them a deadpan look that they can't see. “Are you really going to do this?”

“My identity is a secret.”

“No shit, but I also just saved your sorry ass.”

The guy doesn't say anything, but Lance knows this game, has played this game a lot, in fact can play this game all day, and is very good at knowing if he'll win. He's right, and the staring contest ends quickly. “Fine!” the guy shouts, throwing up his hands. He taps his mask and it disappears in a flash of blue light.

He's a human teenager. A very annoyed human teenager, bearing a look that Lance knows _way_ too well. “You're human,” Lance says, keeping his voice level.

The kid folds his arms and looks to the side. “Yes.”

“You're an 'it's complicated' human then,” Lance deduces. “What's your name?”

The kid glares at him, and fuck if he doesn't look just like Daniel did when _he_ was pissed off at Lance. “Take off _your_ mask.”

“Fine, fine,” Lance grumbles. His mask isn't some fancy tech like the kid's though, so he has to actually physically remove it.

He isn't entirely surprised when the kid's jaw drops, because definitely neither of them were expecting to meet another human. But then the kid says, “You're Commander Holt,” and oh, he recognizes him. Then he grins widely. “I've _got_ to get you to Matt and Pidge.”

“You know where Matt is?” Then the second part catches up with Lance. “Wait, _Katie_ is out here?”

The kid nods _way_ too ecstatically. “Yeah! They've both been looking for you! I'm Keith, by the way,” and isn't _that_ name a blast from Lance's past. But it's definitely a coincidence.

* * *

Lance flies to a secret rebel base according to Keith's instructions. He's barely opened the hatch and stepped out before his son is flying at him. “Dad!”

Lance does, in fact, manage to catch Matt without falling over. It's almost a close one though. He never wants to let him go. He doesn't say anything. He just cries. He can feel Matt dampening his own shoulder.

After a while Matt tries to pull away, but Lance doesn't let him, so instead he says into his shoulder, “Katie's on her way, when Keith called me I called her right away. They're supposed to be warping in any minute now, you got here just before their scheduled arrival.”

And then, as if summoned, a giant, unerringly familiar roar rattles the hangar. This time Lance lets Matt pull away, though their arms remain around each other. A giant robot cat painted green dives from the sky and all but slams into the ground. Her mouth opens up and the pilot sprints out, and Katie's throwing her helmet to the side as she runs at them. And Lance has to bite his lip to stop himself from screaming because apparently the universe is a dick and this is so, so, _so_ unfair.

“Dad!” she shrieks, and throws herself at him, and then Lance is holding both of his children in his arms, which he wasn't totally sure he'd ever get to do again.

“I found something of yours, Pidge.” Lance can hear the grin in Keith's voice. He starts getting feelings of vague responsibility and self-fulfilling prophecies.

Katie is in his arms for way too short a time before she's tugging him away. “Come on, everyone wants to meet you! And Shiro! Shiro's here too!”

“Yeah,” Lance says, feeling slightly unreal. “Keith told me.”

He gets hustled into the Green Lion by Matt and Katie, and Keith gets dragged along with, Katie berating him for not calling. Because apparently Keith also used to pilot a lion before going off on his own. Lance kind of wants to cry.

* * *

Katie lands expertly in the hangar on the starship that was waiting for them in orbit. His baby girl is all grown up and fighting in an interstellar war, and is also going by Pidge again and flying the Green Lion of Voltron, and Lance is going to scream.

They disembark and Lance scans the people waiting for them, and yup, there's Shiro at the head of the pack, and a couple more human teenagers, and-

Lance pushes himself in front of the others, one arm out to keep them from trying to get out from behind him, the other already pointing his blaster at the aliens. “Alteans!” he snaps out like a curse.

“Commander-” Shiro starts, raising his hands up in a placating gesture.

“Step away from them Shiro! You other two too!”

“You seem to be mistaken-”

“I'm not mistaken at all!” Lance cuts off one of the alteans. “Alteans are dangerous, and liars, and _they will use you_. Step away from them, all of you!”

Everyone starts shouting at once.

“Don't be ridiculous!”

“They're not dangerous!”

“That's what you think, because that's what they want you to think!” Lance explains. “And by the time you figure it out, it'll be too late to stop their plans of intergalactic domination!”

“ _What!_ ”

“They wouldn't!”

“They're not the ones bent on intergalactic domination! The galra wiped them off the map ten thousand years ago!”

“Good riddance! I lost everything because of alteans!”

“Voice of reason time!” shouts one of the teenagers Lance doesn't know. “We've met evil alteans too, remember? The alternate reality?”

Lance's gun hand _almost_ quavers. “Alternate reality?”

“Yes,” the altean woman answers. “We answered a distress call and found an old Altean ship stuck halfway between this reality and another. We went through to an alternate reality where...” she trails off.

The other teenager Lance doesn't know picks up with, “The alteans were lobotomizing everyone they didn't like. Super unfriendly reality, zero out of five stars, do not recommend.”

“Dad,” Katie says, “Allura and Coran aren't like that.”

This time, Lance's gun hand _does_ quaver. “Allura?” It's practically a whisper, but it echoes in the hangar.

“Yeah,” Unknown Teenager #2 says. “And my name's Lance, and that's Hunk.”

Lance's gun hand falls to point at the ground, and the other starts messing with his hair neurotically. “Fuck,” he says. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck.” He barely registers the shocked look on Katie's face. “And that's Keith,” he gestures with his blaster, causing the boy in question to step back in alarm. “What about Sven? Know anyone named Sven?”

“No-” Shiro starts to answer, but Other Lance interrupts him.

“You don't, but we do. We met someone named Sven in the alternate reality. He saved my life.”

“What about Romelle?”

The blood drains from Not-Allura's face. “I had a cousin named Romelle. She was killed by the galra. But how do _you_ know her name?”

Lance finally holsters his blaster, and everyone else is noticeably relieved. “I can explain. But I'd like to explain to my kids first. Alone.”

There's a moment in which everyone trades looks. Then Not-Allura nods. “Of course. We'll leave you now.”

As the others leave, Lance gestures to the Green Lion. “Let's talk in Green.”

Matt and Katie look at each other, then look back at Lance and both nod. “Okay,” Katie says.

* * *

Lance settles in on the floor of Green. Across from him, Matt and Katie do the same. “Okay. So.” He stops. He has no idea how to start. He never expected to _have_ to start.

“Start at the beginning?” Matt suggests, guessing his dilemma.

“If I started at the beginning, we'd be here for days.” He tilts his head back to rest it against the wall. “Ugh. You know what? I'll just start wherever. And you're going to want to interrupt right away, but don't. Again, whole story, be here for days. I'll try to cover all the bases.”

“Okay,” Katie says.

“Okay, so, team. I was part of a team. I actually led it for a while after our leader fucked off – Katie, you're fourteen now, I can swear in front of you. Anyway, our leader went off to do his own thing, but then he came back, and you know what, this is too far back. All of this is even before I met Colleen, by the way. Just in case you get confused. She had nothing to do with any of this.

“So my team, the team I was part of, we were looking for this planet. And we found it. Only the drule had gotten there first – nasty people, look just like the galra, pretty sure they were the galra but with a different name – and put this giant shield around the whole planet to prevent anyone from leaving. Ten thousand years ago. A spacefaring race stuck on the same planet for ten thousand years. And we were going to find out why.

“We're able to get onto the main satellite that controls the shield, communicates with all the other satellites powering it, and power down the shield. We land, meet the locals, everything goes great. They're really helpful, promise to give us what we came looking for in the first place, show us around. Show us their hangars full of spaceships, because it turns out they'd been really looking forward to someone coming along and turning off the shield. They weren't expecting it to take ten thousand years, and were really excited about being able to leave. We didn't blame them.”

Lance sighs, runs a hand through his hair. “I don't know if they'd gotten planet-wide cabin fever, or if the drule had actually done a good deed. Either way, little things started to not add up. The information we were promised kept not showing up. Their flagship was incredible, beautiful, extremely powerful, but didn't have a power source. There was a place to put a power source, like they knew exactly how they would power her, but they acted like they had no way to power her.

“We did some snooping, and found the power source they claimed they didn't have. It was a comet with trans-reality capabilities. Some of it had already been used to build our ships, which was why we were looking for the planet in the first place, but they still had enough to power their flagship, and had already shaped it into an engine. All that remained was to install it. So, we confronted them about it.

“Of course, that's when things get nasty. As in, intergalactic domination level nasty. And once they were done with that reality, they were going to move on to others, collecting all versions of that comet that they could their hands on as they went, so that they could build more trans-reality ships and conquer every reality even _faster_.

“We got the hell out of Dodge, got the shield back up, but it was too late, their flagship had already escaped the area covered by the shield. They were preparing to warp to an alternate reality and we had no way to stop them in time. So I decided to play the heroic sacrifice card and rammed the comet engine.”

Lance spread his arms wide. “And that's the story of how I got stuck in an alternate reality.”

“...Holy shit,” Matt finally says.

“I woke up under guard in a hospital bed. Turned out I'd appeared out of nowhere, unconscious, in Galaxy Garrison's top-secret cousin. It took forever to convince them that I was telling the truth. They still didn't really trust me, so they gave me a legal identity on the condition that I work for them. I changed my name to Samuel Holt, because if there was a version of me in this reality then still using my real name could be bad.

“So.” Lance sighs, dreading this last bit. “My real name is Lance McClain, I used to pilot the Red Lion of Voltron, and this whole day has been _really surreal_.”

Matt and Katie go bug-eyed. There's a long silence while they process everything he just said. Lance lets it sit, knowing that the questions will come when they come.

“Is that why you realized Allura and Coran weren't like those other alteans you knew when you found out their names?” Katie asks.

“Yeah,” and wow, Lance really didn't expect his voice to come out so rough. “I'm also from several hundred years in the future, after humanity had spread out and colonized other planets. Allura and Coran were the human descendants on one of those planets. Arus.”

“Arus is where-”

“I know. I went there after I first found out about Voltron, and found where the Castle was.”

It was Matt's turn to ask a question. “So can you make like a TV show character who spent the episode having a weird dream and go, 'And you were there, and you were there?'”

“Keith piloted Black, I was in Red, Hunk piloted Yellow, Allura Blue, and... Pidge piloted Green.”

Katie snorts. “Yeah, we had that setup for a bit. It... didn't work so well.”

“Keith reminds me a lot of this kid I knew, Daniel, so yeah, I can definitely see that. Daniel had... issues.” And isn't _that_ the understatement of the century. Millennium. Reality. Something like that.

Matt, Lance could tell, was putting some pieces together. “Wait. So if you knew Pidge in an alternate reality, does that mean you nicknamed her after her alternate reality self? Because that's recursive as hell.”

Lance bangs his head against Green. “Yup, and now that I know it, it seems really stupid and also awkward.”

Katie makes a face. “Yeah. The idea of having a kid and naming him Lance, then finding out he _is_ Lance, is definitely... weird.”

Lance nearly rockets forward. “ _Please_ tell me you're not dating him, he's too old for you, I know it doesn't seem like it but when you're fourteen even a couple years is _miles_ away-”

“ _What_ , no, no way, he's like my older brother-!” and then Katie figures out why Lance said that and shrieks, burying her face in her hands. “You named me after your ex and then _I became your ex!_ ”

Matt starts giggling, but it sounds slightly hysterical. “Oh my god Dad. That's incredible.”

“Please don't tell anyone, because there's like five layers of wrong here.”

Katie, face still buried, emphatically shakes her head. Lance feels a presence in his head. The Green Lion is laughing at him. He gives her the middle finger.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on Tumblr: codefiant.tumblr.com


End file.
